Illustration by Ole Tillmann

This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

While getting your crude oil all over the place is usually frowned upon, there's one town in Azerbaijan where they've tied their fortunes to dunking tourists in the stuff. You may have heard of this practice, as Western media periodically makes note of it in pieces that range from mocking to only sort of mocking in tone.

The spa town is Naftalan, whose boosters use a nod from Marco Polo and an ancient myth about a mangy camel cured by oily water to claim a centuries-long appreciation for the curative properties of their precious sticky icky. The country's not-very-free media outlets are the primary source of scholarship on the anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, anti-arthritic benefits of soaking in oil (the Environmental Protection Agency considers its primary ingredient, naphthalene, a "possible human carcinogen"). These arguments date to the late 19th century, when a German entrepreneur, frustrated that the Naftalan crude didn't burn easily, marketed it instead as a salve. The Soviets picked up on the idea as a way to fuel the local economy, and in the 1980s about 75,000 people visited Naftalan's oil spas each year, helped there by free trips offered by the government. But the USSR called it quits in 1991, followed by a brutal war between Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia. Pleasure seekers vanished as hotel rooms filled with refugees.

Azeris' next repressive regime looked a lot like the last one. Heydar Aliyev, who had been the leader of Azerbaijan in the Soviet era, again took control of the country, from 1993 until his death, in 2003, after which his son, Ilham, was "elected" president. The younger Aliyev shared his predecessor's hope that Naftalan's unique draw, its ailment-curin' oil, could shoehorn some diversity into the country's energy-dependent economy. Spas and sanatoria have been renovated and expanded in an effort to attract more international visitors. With each new project, President Aliyev dutifully cuts the ribbon before awkward press tours. Videos show him watching bathtubs in luxury rooms sputter and fill with dark brown oil, his humorless face definitely not smiling for the cameras. Ah, Naftalan.

Sheriff David Morgan addressing reporters in Pensacola, Florida, on Tuesday. Photo via Escambia County Sheriff's Office/Facebook

Sometime last week, probably on Tuesday night, a visitor entered the residence of the Smith family on Deerfield Drive in Pensacola, Florida, without much trouble. This alone was a bit unusual given just how reclusive the Smiths were; after all, some of their neighbors of many years have never even spoken to them, much less stepped inside their home.

But what happened next was even more strange, and far more disturbing: According to the Escambia County Sheriff's Office, all three of the Smiths were murdered in a ritualistic fashion that might have something to do with the recent "blue moon" (an extra full moon in a given lunar cycle). When pressed for details on what faith's rituals he might be referring to, Sheriff David Morgan didn't exactly mince words.

"It's witchcraft," he said Tuesday at a local press conference. "I'll say that right now."

Voncile Smith, 77, John William Smith, 49, and Richard Thomas Smith, 47, were killed by blunt force trauma, according to authorities, as the Pensacola News Journal reported on Wednesday. All three of the victims were hit with a claw hammer and had their throats slit.

Although the sheriff described the trio as "very, very comfortable" financially and indicated there was a safe full of money in their home, the Smiths were not robbed. Instead, authorities seem to be probing the occult angle.

"The method of the murder, blunt force traumas, slit throats, positions of bodies and then our person of interest has some ties to a faith or religion that is indicative of that," Sheriff Morgan told reporters. "Those of you that follow any of that will also note that at the time of death we believe on Tuesday it also coincides with what's referred to as a blue moon, which occurs every three years."

Dawn Perlmutter, the director of the Institute for the Research of Organized and Ritual Violence, told me that that ritualistic killings are "usually defined by when the trauma goes beyond whats necessary to kill someone," which means that this case technically fits the bill.

Related: Brooklyn's Wiccans Celebrated Halloween with Potato Chips and an Ikea Decoration

The Smiths' bodies were discovered last Friday during a welfare check after a neighbor called the police. The scene was complex enough that it took several days to investigate, and was complicated further by the fact that Richard Smith—who was also reportedly shot in the head—was an employee of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Escambia County Sheriffs Office wanted to make sure there were no national security issues presented by releasing his name to the public.

Police have identified a person of interest in the case, but they're only saying he was a white male with knowledge of the family. Sheriff Morgan also pointed out that just because he thought the person of interest was probably involved in witchcraft doesn't mean that all Wicca practitioners are crazies who carry out ritualistic slaughter. In the press conference, he mentioned a family member who was a Pentecostal, but who did not handle poisonous snakes, saying, "One of the great things about our country you can believe in pretty anything you want to believe in."

Meanwhile, there's already a Change.org petition where witchcraft defenders can push back on the idea that anyone practicing the Wicca faith can be violent.

"Wiccan religion is based on the love of nature and all things peaceful with harm to none, the petition reads. "No where in any history of our religion is sacrificing any living thing part of any religious ritual of any type."

Pensacola was gripped by another bizarre, high-profile murder case in 2009, when Byrd and Melanie Billings—a couple known for adopting special needs children—were shot to death in their home (with at least one of those children present) by five robbers dressed in ninja costumes. Eight people were ultimately arrested in relation to that incident, which was also investigated by Sheriff Morgan.

Morgan seems to have thought that case was a hit. "We'd all prefer it if this were a group of losers visiting a random act of violence on this family," he told TIME in 2009, "but with each passing day and each new witness, we're finding that's probably not the case."

People in Florida's Panhandle, which is characterized in part by the cultural conservatism and fundamentalist Christianity endemic to the Deep South, are apparently spooked by their region making the news rounds for this sort of story. Representatives from Pensacola's historical society either could or would not offer any information about the history of the occult in the city when reached for comment by VICE.

Former law enforcement officials were also reluctant to engage in conversation. One ex-FBI special agent who used to work in North Florida and now makes himself available for interviews would not even broach how one might determine a murder was "ritualistic" in the most abstract of ways.

"I do not know who you are, and this is making me very uncomfortable," the former agent said. "I'm going to have to terminate the conversation."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Baria's booking photo, via Perry County Sheriff's Department

More on militaries:

The US Military Euthanized or Abandoned Thousands of Their Own Canine Soldiers at the End of the Vietnam War

Why British Soldiers Are Finding It Harder to Come Home

The US Military Is Getting Closer to Creating Self-Guided Bullets

One man has been arrested and charged after two days of mysterious gunfire being reported in the area around Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Soldiers at the center who were standing guard at a checkpoint initially reported that they heard gunshots coming from the nearby woods on Tuesday at around 8 AM. On Wednesday when they heard more gunshots in the same spot around 11:45 AM, Camp Shelby went into an elevated state of alert. Lieutenant Colonel Christian Patterson told USA Today that no one has been hurt. The soldiers standing guard said they saw at least one white man in a red pickup truck.

It should be noted that the base is one of the locations of the Jade Helm 15 military exercise. The secret military training drill is a multi-state operation scheduled to go on until the middle of September, involving about 1,200 military personnel, most of whom are from the Army. In addition to the center's usual 4,600 active-duty personnel, and reservists from Mississippi and Texas have been brought in for "summer training exercise" according to Biloxi, Missippi's newspaper The Sun Herald.

As we've noted before, the exercise triggered a fair amount of fear and paranoia about the Obama administration declaring martial law or taking away citizens' guns. The Governor of Texas has even launched a monitoring program. An organization called Counter Jade Helm was formed, boasting hundreds of volunteers, and in Texas, some of those averse to a secret military operation in their neighborhood stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Initial reports had a "person of interest" near camp shelby being apprehended dramatically at gunpoint. The AP later identified him as 61-year-old Alfred Baria. Baria has been charged with disturbing the peace, a misdemeanor, and, after a search of his house, possession of guns, which is a felony. According to Perry County Sheriff Jimmy Dale Smith, Baria will have a bail hearing tomorrow.

Photos taken at the scene show the seemingly caucasian Baria on his knees outside a red pickup truck, just as described by the guards who reported the gunshots. According to Yahoo News, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation initially took him into custody, and according to agency spokesman Warren Strain, he defended himself by claiming he can't control when his truck backfires.

Nearby street signs were discovered to have bullet holes in them.

Sometime after the authorities converged on the scene, they found what they perceived to be a suspicious parcel in the truck, prompting a whole circus of bomb squad technicians, dogs, and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to show up as well. The FBI has also been notified, according to The Sun Herald.

The ATF's Jason Denham later announced to the local TV news station WLBT that the suspicious package contained PVC pipe and "caps" (presumably blasting caps), but was not a bomb. Baria's truck has been towed away, and the area is now clear.

For their part, the Mississippi volunteers at Counter Jade Helm haven't yet reported any clashes with the military. Yesterday, however, the FBI arrested three North Carolina men for possession of bomb-making supplies. Authorities told reporters that the men were plotting to used explosives to counter attempts by the US government to impose martial law.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Karl Ove Knausgaard enjoying a cigarette in Manhattan. Photo by Abazar Khayami

This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

Karl Ove Knausgaard was smoking in the alleyway. It was a bright May afternoon in New York, and the Norwegian author was wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses and dressed in a tan blazer and blue jeans—a kind of summer literary casual. Knausgaard was back in the US, making the publicity rounds for the fourth and newest English installment of My Struggle, his six-volume autobiographical novel turned international sensation (an excerpt from which was published on VICE.com). Our meeting had been slotted between an interview he'd just finished with Leonard Lopate, on NPR, and another he'd be giving for VICE Meets—which would be followed three hours later by a conversation with the writer Rivka Galchen in front of more than 800 fans at the 92nd Street Y. It's like this every time he comes to New York.

We were taking a break from a fancy lunch—smoked trout and mussels—at a fancy restaurant on the Lower East Side, a meal that the uncommonly polite and gracious Knausgaard thanked me for three times over the course of his visit. It was a warm gesture, and a useful one, something to minimize the awkwardness. After all, without this lunch, what would we actually have in common? Despite all I'd read—roughly 1,000 pages of his deeply personal writing, which is, I'm ashamed to admit, only roughly half of his output available so far in English—the two of us were strangers. And yet, like his other readers, I was privy to so many uncomfortable details about his most intimate moments (or what we believe to be details about his most intimate moments—the books are, after all, described as fiction): how he sliced up his own face drunkenly one night after being spurned by Linda, the Swedish poet who would later become his wife (Book Two); how he had been unable to stop crying after his father died (Book One); how at 18 he had still never once masturbated—"never beat off"—a fact that led to frequent "heavy nocturnal emissions," his underpants "soaked with semen" (Book Four).

There, in the alleyway, I asked Knausgaard if I might take a few photos of him, and he answered yes, of course. As if intuiting my preference, he removed his sunglasses. Facing the camera, he has a naturally dramatic look—jagged face, thick, sweeping gray hair, and a penetrating blue-eyed stare. Instead of posing with the cigarette between his lips, as he does in so many of his portraits—like a musician or an actor—he held it angled downward in a way that felt vaguely apologetic, as if to say, "Sorry for the smoke."

"Do you think you'll ever quit?" I asked, after the photos were done.

"I once quit for a year," he replied, stamping out the butt. "Then I started again. But I must eventually quit. It's important for me to live as long as I can, for my children."

"I think a lot of people [in Norway] dislike me and my writing," the 46-year-old told me over lunch that day, "just because it has become so massive." In a country of 5 million, one in nine Norwegians owns a copy of his books. "I think people are sick and tired of seeing my face in the newspaper."

Even in the US, where publishers are famously uninterested in translated works, the author, who was raised on the wooded island of Tromøy, has somehow ascended to the pinnacle of major literary status, achieving a kind of triple crown of reception—among the public, the critics, and fellow practitioners. His books can be found on sale at airports and excerpted in the pages of the Paris Review. Among his admirers are Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, and the New Yorker critic James Wood—to say nothing of the throng of lesser-known fans who fill auditoriums and theaters in New York and San Francisco, waiting in line for hours to get in, and for hours again to get autographs and photos with the towering (in both senses of the word—distinguished and also very tall; he is 6'4") Norwegian.

"I grew up in the 80s," he said, as we finished our meal. "And there was this thought that what is difficult—that is quality. So having commercial success—that's not good in that aesthetic. It's like R.E.M., when they changed to Warner. That was a sellout there. It was like, 'Goodbye to R.E.M.'

"I think it's an awkward thing, thinking there is a difference between reaching many people and quality," he continued. "It still is what every writer wants to do, of course, to reach out in a way. So I haven't sold out yet," he said, laughing.

For more on the author, watch our doc 'VICE Meets Karl Ove Knausgaard':

Over the past year I've spent following Knausgaard-mania, the question I keep getting asked is, "Why do you think he's so popular?" The question comes particularly often from curious Norwegians living in New York, who have been astonished to see one of their own receive so much cultural attention. Outside of the work—which I think is fantastic: moving, insightful, and vigorous, as well as bizarrely engrossing—part of the reason may have something to do with Knausgaard's simultaneous embrace of and distaste for the limelight. Onstage, he's remarkably good at public speaking—serving up self-deprecating remarks at a regular clip—while also maintaining an appealing air of discomfort with the whole thing, a certain pained awareness. It appears as though he's both grateful and embarrassed, a feeling that is conveyed in his smile, which Knausgaard has described alternately in his books as a "strained but courteous smile," an "apologetic smile," and a smile that is "squeezed"—a tired, slightly dutiful look that's more of a sigh, or even a grimace.

After one event in Brooklyn, I spoke with a woman in her 30s named Danielle, a self-professed "superfan," whom I remembered talking to the year before at a packed Knausgaard event with Zadie Smith. We stood near the signing table and the line of fans, many of them with four or five tomes cradled in their arms, like freshmen at the student bookstore. I asked if she was going to get him to sign something.

"I don't want to do it," said Danielle, who claimed she had read not only all four volumes available in English but the first book three separate times, along with his 22,000-word, two-part New York Times essay about America twice—roughly 3,000 pages of the guy's writing. "It would be like stealing something from him," she explained, visibly horrified by the idea. "He's given me so much. Do you want to meet Emma Bovary? Do you really want to meet your favorite character?

"I mean, look at him," she continued, pointing to Knausgaard as he sat patiently at a table, dutifully signing books and receiving his audience. "Do you think he really enjoys this?"

Two weeks later, at the end of May, Knausgaard was once again in New York and once again onstage, at another large former-warehouse space. This time it was in a vastly different capacity—as the drummer for his college band Lemen, which had been invited to perform as part of something called the Norwegian-American Literary Festival. The rangy author was no Keith Moon behind the set—at one point he dislodged one of the cymbals—but the overall performance was far less embarrassing than I had imagined it would be. The band played a kind of not-so-hip roots-rock style that recalled Natalie Merchant or Melissa Etheridge. As they performed, people—mostly women in their 20s and 30s—danced at the front of the stage while pulling out their cameras to capture the best angle of the novelist cum drummer.

"He's so good-looking," gushed a female editor I know, and when I looked back I saw the literary titans Lydia Davis and Dag Solstad, who were also in town for the festival, swaying to the music. They didn't look displeased.

After Lemen's performance, which was followed by James Wood drumming with a Norwegian rocker supergroup, including Knut Schreiner on loan from punk rockers Turbonegro (it was a weird night), a large group of us left the club for a pub down the street. Karl Ove and Yngve Knausgaard, who plays guitar in Lemen and bears more than a passing resemblance to his younger brother, sat at the head of a long communal table, like a pair of modern Nordic kings. On the booth side I found myself next to Ane Farsethås, the culture editor at Morgenbladet, one of Norway's oldest newspapers. Farsethås had served as Solstad's interpreter for the event.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my lifetime," she recalled of Knausgaard-mania in their home country. "It was an immediate thing. Everywhere people were like, 'This reminds me of a scene in My Struggle.' But nobody ever expected that to exceed the boundaries of our country. To see it in the US, it's exactly the same."

I asked Farsethås about what happened after the sixth book. "Novel six is eleven hundred pages," she explained. "It was just too much. After that, it kind of calmed down. That's my prediction of what will happen here, too."

Later that night, I stood outside with Knausgaard as he had a smoke. A dark-haired white man in his 30s came up to us, speaking Norwegian to Knausgaard. When he realized that I didn't understand, he immediately apologized. He explained, in English, that he was asking Knausgaard how he thought the festival was going. He had never heard him play the drums before.

I turned to Knausgaard and asked, "Has anyone in the US heard you play before?" He answered no and gave me his patient, faintly exhausted smile. "Now, let's talk about something else," he laughed, hurrying back inside.

Follow James Yeh on Twitter.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Someone asked me if it gets better and I said yes and they said how? and I got silent.

The truth is that mental illness (in my case: panic disorder with general anxiety and underlying depression) does get better. It gets better, then it gets worse, then better, then worse—at least in my experience.

You would think that having gone through enough of these cycles, I would persevere through a down phase with strong faith that things will get better again. But I still haven't totally learned to ride the waves. After all these years, I still get scared that there is no exit. I think, What if this one lasts forever? What if they never get my meds right again? What if this is the one that pushes me over the edge? People say, This too shall pass and I'm like, Yeah, OK.

That's the thing with a catastrophizing mind: it always uses a lot what-ifs and it uses them in a threatening voice. The what-ifs become definites. And they're bad.

One might also think, having gone through so many of these cycles, that I would know the good times don't last forever either. I would know that I am always susceptible to mental illness and that there is no one thing I can do to be rendered "OK" forever. But when I'm doing OK, I forget. I forget, in part, because I want to forget. I forget to the point that when the illness returns (as it always does) it can take me by surprise.

Right now I'm in a pretty OK place. This is the result of a new cognitive-behavioral therapist and a new combination of medications. But it's also a result of that mysterious thing—beyond our power—that can render us mentally sick or mentally well.

Mental wellness, for me, is alchemy. I can take good care of myself. I can feed or starve the illness with unhealthy or healthy behaviors. I can influence it. But ultimately, I am never totally in control.

There's also a new anti-anxiety technique that I made up for myself after changing medications a few months ago, and it seems to be working. I had just survived one of the most harrowing periods of anxiety and depression that I'd ever experienced, and was on the way up. Things were definitely starting to get better in my brain. But I was so afraid of returning to the state I had been in that I became hyperaware of every micro-shift inside me. This hyperawareness didn't allow me to get better. Any time I experienced a change in mood or a scary thought, it was met with an immediate, What if it's coming back?

One night, I began feeling dizzy and my vision blurred. This had nothing to do with anxiety or depression. I was simply exhausted from staring at a computer screen for twelve hours. But a voice inside, the catastrophizing voice, wanted to run with it. What if this is death? Who is to say it isn't the end? If it's not death, then what is this sinking feeling? What if I am entering the realm of amorphous dread again? Am I going to get out?

This was the beginning of a panic attack. Panic attacks can appear very quickly and are best friends with empty catastrophe. When they come on, I can't rationalize with the anxiety. I can't rationalize with the anxiety, because it's not rational. It's not just a thought. It's a visceral feeling.

But this time something different happened. Strangely, a totally new voice inside me started talking. It wasn't an intellectual voice, gently trying to talk sense to the nonsensical. This voice was pissed off. It was what one might call a 'hell no' voice--fed up with what the anxiety has done to me, how much of my life it has taken. It was livid with the catastrophizing voice. It was like, Nah bitch. You are fucking done.

The catastrophizing voice was shocked. It tried to fight back, to assert its primacy. But the 'hell no' voice wouldn't hear it.

The catastrophizing voice said, What if...

The hell no voice said, Sorry, bitch.

The catastrophizing voice said, But what if...

The hell no voice said, What if what? What if you're dying? Melting down? So die then. Melt down. I don't give a shit. But you are not allowed to worry about it. You're literally not allowed.

The catastrophizing voice made a last peep. But the hell no voice stayed on top. If you want to worry, it said, then you will have to do it on your own time. If you want to worry, you can do it one week from today. One week from today you can worry all you want. Of course you can't worry if you're dead, but I don't really care about that. For now you have to shut up.

I don't know how the hell no voice came up with the 'one week from now' thing. But the catastrophizing voice seemed to like it, because it shut up. Maybe it enjoyed being given an endpoint. It was like, OK, it's not that I can never obsess again. I just can't do it until this set time.

Also, I think the catastrophizing voice actually got off on being yelled at. Maybe it was tired of being on top? Worrying is exhausting. Perhaps it got turned on by the hell no voice and was like, Fuck it, I'm taking a vacation. I'm gonna go masturbate for a week. Then, when a week was up, the hell no voice pushed the worrying date back another week. Then another. So the catastrophizing voice extended its vacation.

Since then, the catastrophizing voice hasn't been seen or heard from. I want to believe it's gone for good. But past experience tells me it's only resting. No matter how hard I go in the therapy, how accurate my meds, how green my juice, how abdominal my breathing, this is no eternal okayness. It's definitely not dead.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its anonymous author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of abiweekly column on this website.

Peter Sutcliffe, aka The Yorkshire Ripper

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The day is June 26, 1979 and police detective George Oldfield—a man so tired he resembles an ancient cliff one moment away from collapsing into the ocean—has called a press conference to announce a breakthrough in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.

The breakthrough is this: Oldfield has been sent a tape from the serial killer he has been pursuing for almost half a decade. One year previously, he had received a letter, postmarked from Sunderland, mocking him and his team for their failure to catch the Ripper. The tape is unremarkable in its contents, barring one thing: the speaker's unmistakable accent. The killer came from Sunderland, in Wearside.

Yorkshire is a huge place. In 1974, just one year before the Yorkshire Ripper began his spree, the entire county was separated into three subsidiaries for simply being too large: West, East, and North ridings. Even then, North Yorkshire was still the largest county in England. A passionate and prideful place, accents, cultures, and idiosyncrasies vary from town to town, sometimes from street to street. To Oldfield and his team, who had previously been spending the vast majority of their time interviewing suspects around Bradford and Leeds, this tape was a Eureka moment. They moved their search 100 miles north to Sunderland with renewed vigor: The killer had given himself away.

Except, of course, he hadn't. The Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, had not sent any letters or recordings to Oldfield. He was from Bingley, a town in West Riding, on the northeast side of Bradford's urban sprawl. While the police interviewed 40,000 suspects throughout Wearside, Sutcliffe killed three more women.

When Sutcliffe was finally arrested, in a driveway in Sheffield in January 1981, there were hardly any celebrations from the police force. They had been lied to—three times—and fallen for it, each time. They had wasted £1 million ($1.5 million) in police money and allowed a monster to roam the streets. In the process, Sutcliffe had been interviewed nine times, but continually ruled out due to his accent. Oldfield, humiliated, bruised, exhausted, took early retirement. Four years later he died.

This is not the end of the story. Twenty-six years later, Wearside Jack—the name the media gave the man who was pretending to be Peter Sutcliffe—was caught when West Yorkshire Police reopened the case after a small piece of forensic evidence from one of his letters was discovered hidden away within their laboratory.

John Humble, a Wearside native and semi-drifter, was arrested. You can hear him speaking on his recorded message to Oldfield, his voice rising up from the player like a spirit through a Ouija Board.

John Humble did not kill anyone. He didn't know Peter Sutcliffe, but for some reason he felt inclined to reach out to a laboring police force and pretend. He liked darts, a good pint, and crime fiction. He drifted between incomes—window cleaner to laborer to the dole—and once tried to throw himself in the River Wear. He married and divorced. He drank. He drank some more. He was, essentially, a pretty standard bloke. Except for the fact he decided to take credit for one of the worst killing sprees in British history, in so doing deflecting the course of justice and causing an untold amount of grief to many thousands of people.

John Humble, aka Wearside Jack, who pretended to be Peter Sutcliffe

The question of why—why would someone want to impersonate a serial killer?—is a difficult one to answer. And yet, it is a surprisingly regular occurrence. According to the Innocence Project, one in four people convicted of a crime who made a confession were, in fact, innocent. Other people have appeared after the disappearance of a child and claimed to be them—most recently someone emerged lying about being Ben Needham, who disappeared in Greece 25 years ago. Then there were the Reykjavik Confessions, where six Icelanders confessed to a murder they did not commit.

"My guess as to why [people impersonate serial killers]," Mark Blacklock, author of I'm Jack, tells me over email, "[is that] it's a gigantic 'fuck you' to societal norms, a willed act of transgression. There's almost a satiric urge in it, I think, a kind of curdled attempt at culture jamming. And crucially, a lack of awareness of, or a disregard for, potential consequences."

WATCH: VICE talks to Joshua Oppenheimer about his new film 'The Look of Silence'

Blacklock's I'm Jack is a novelization of John Humble's life after his incarceration. Told in letters and transcripts and winding episodes of first-person narration, it explores these ideas in some creative detail. The most interesting point the novel makes is that hoaxers are, of course, fiction writers.

Fiction feels like the most natural place to go in search of answers. Both fiction and hoaxing involve the process of impersonation, of ventriloquism. Both obfuscate the truth and transform what is real into something else.

Blacklock's novel is remarkable as it exists as the impersonation of the impersonator. Blacklock is pretending to be Humble, as Humble pretended to be Sutcliffe. "I made two separate Freedom of Information requests for the CPS case file and was, quite correctly I think, knocked back on each occasion," he explains. "In retrospect that was a real blessing because, in my frustration, I began to recreate the documents I wanted to read."

He "taught [himself] graphology in an afternoon" and made his own analysis of Humble's handwriting.

Empathy is also crucial to the act of impersonation, of course. By impersonating a serial killer, the hoaxer moves closer to the assailant. "In assuming a voice you do begin to feel empathy for its origin—in many ways, this book is an exercise in a kind of imaginative empathy," says Blacklock. "But I'm aware that what I'm empathizing with is my own creation. I'm also aware, of course, of the real, extra-textual John Humble, and I've no desire to inflict any more punishment on him but I do feel that the worst that can happen to him—his apprehension and imprisonment—has already happened."

Mark Blacklock, author of 'I'm Jack'

What's more interesting is how the serial killer is a very modern construct, rising out of the 50s and 60s' rapid increase in surveillance and personal connectivity. Killers are the star of front pages, news rounds, blockbuster movies, bestselling novels, popular television shows and even songs.

"After World War II, pop culture audiences were tired of feeling sorry for the mass murderer and believed in the myth that cold-blooded killers were getting away with murder thanks to fraudulent insanity defenses," professor and author Thomas Horan tells me. "Therefore, the old psychokiller archetype underwent a process of deconstruction in the popular and tabloid media. This left a void—the tabloid media needed their mass murderers to sell papers, but audiences had rejected the old psychokiller archetype.

"In my research into the pop culture figure of the mass murderer, I saw a distinction between the modern, Freudian 'psychokiller,' a person who himself was the victim, so to speak, of uncontrollable compulsions to kill, versus the postmodern, rational, deliberate 'serial killer.'"

At the precise same time as Humble was impersonating the Yorkshire Ripper in England, a murderer began to prowl the Northern Californian highways. The Zodiac Killer, perhaps the most famous of all serial killers, was also, coincidentally, a letter writer.

"The San Francisco Chronicle began receiving letters from a person who not only claimed to be the murderer of several young people in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also disclaimed any lack of conscious will or deliberate intention," Horan continues. "That is, he took full responsibly for 'his' murderous behavior and demonstrated in his letters a fully rational, if disturbing, motive, rational premeditation, and complete 'recall' of each crime."

A section of a letter sent by the Zodiac Killer to the 'San Francisco Chronicle'

"The problem was, according to Horan, that there was no proof that the multitudes of letters sent to various recipients across Northern California in the 1960s were all actually from the Zodiac Killer. "From the handwriting, the contents of the letters, and the style," says Horan, "it is apparent that [at least one other person took up writing the letters], after the first three or four."

All the Zodiac letters were written to Dear Editor, much how Humble's letters were directed specifically to Oldfield. It's fascinating that at the exact same time, within two drastically different places, the same phenomenon was occurring. And, just like John Humble, Horan argues that the letters "clearly interfered with the police investigation."

"If the Zodiac hadn't written to the Chronicle, they would have had to invent him," he says.

"We're certainly all implicated in the game of identity construction and destruction. I'm conscious that in a very real sense the name Mark Blacklock attached to this book is no longer something over which I should expect to be able to claim authority (if I ever could)," says Blacklock.

"I always found Humble's claims that he was motivated by a resentment of the police and a desire to focus more attention onto the case completely unsatisfactory," Blacklock continues. "I've come to think of the hoaxer as a troll before the letter. He's a harbinger of below-the-line textuality, that seething underworld of spitfleck opinion, resentment, and frustration. There's a bit of troll in us all, I think. We can turn off the comments but we can't stem the source from which they flow."

Whatever the motivations and causes may be, the results are always the same: pain and waste. Hoaxers may think it is all just a bit of fun, but between Sutcliffe and the Zodiac, 18 people lost their lives. At least. Hoaxers may be an interesting intellectual idea, but fundamentally they are a cruel, damaging diversion. It is the victims that should be remembered – and behind the shroud of a celebrity killer and a hoaxer, it is often easy to forget.

Follow David on Twitter.

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Dave lives with his non-traditional family in Wood Green, North London. I met him in the local area and he allowed me to come back to his house and take some photos of him, his dogs, Coco the cat, and his magpie named Domino. Dave told me that Domino can turn on the lights or turn up the heating when instructed. Domino's wings were not in the best state at the time because he had been getting bullied by the local gang of crows.

Jon Stewart at the Rally to Restore Sanity. Photo via Wikipedia

More on the Daily Show:
Jon Stewart Has Made His Mark on Late-Night TV and on America Itself
Jon Stewart's Amazing Longevity
Jon Stewart Did a Surprise Stand-Up Set at the Comedy Cellar Last Night

When you think about it, you can't remember when you started watching. The show has always just sorta been there, reliably, a 7 PM rerun of the last night's episode, then the new one at 11 PM, that familiar pop-punk riff, the set that looks oddly space-aged and cheap at the same time—it's just part of the furniture of your adolescence. Older people probably had the same sort of relationship with Carson or Letterman or the new issue of Mad falling through the mail slot every couple weeks, a piece of culture that seems both universal and delivered just to you, a way of understanding the world and laughing at it that gets grafted onto your personality without your noticing or minding.

For as long as I can remember, Jon Stewart has been on television, being angry at something.

His isn't anger of the vengeful, daddish variety peddled by Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the radio talk-show crowd, the complaining about the way the world is going, the joking that turns into exasperation that's always threatening to turn into sputtering rage. He's angry the way usually only people in Aaron Sorkin scripts are angry—a smart, slightly self-mocking righteousness that is deadly serious about making jokes.

For a lot of people, Stewart said what they thought, only he made it sound funnier and smarter and easier to agree with than they ever could.

You can find traces of that anger in the quivering "You weren't elected" joke Stewart made after Bush won the 2000 election with an assist from a 5–4 Supreme Court decision. But as Brian Unger, a Daily Show staffer from the old Craig Kilborn era, wrote in Slate this week, the program undeniably got more serious after 9/11. One of the show's most famous moments is the tearful, halting monologue Stewart delivered to open the first episode to air after the planes hit the towers. A sample:

The show in general... is a privilege. Even the idea that we can sit in the back of the country and make wisecracks... but never forgetting the fact that it is a luxury in this country that allows us to do that, that it is a country that allows for open satire. And I know that sounds basic, and it sounds as though it goes without saying, but that's really what this whole situation is about: It's the difference between closed and open, it's the difference between free and burdened. And we don't take that for granted here by any stretch of the imagination—and our show has changed, I don't doubt that. What it's become, I don't know.

What the show became is kind of exhausting to contemplate. Every day, a politician said something stupid or introduced some terrible bill that turns poor children into food for rich children; every day, Fox News conjured up guests who say that Barack Obama is a Muslim or that people complaining about police brutality should just shut up. Every day, people who have power were revealed to be wrong, or craven, or flat-out making shit up, and every day, Stewart and The Daily Show made fun of them. He did that for 16 years, four nights a week. That requires not only an ever-replenishing source of writers and correspondents, but also an endless supply of earnestness that allowed Stewart to get upset—or perform the act of getting upset—at each new indignity, every single disingenuous talking point and salvo in the never-ending media wars.

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The Daily Show, under Jon Stewart, spent a decade and a half laboriously explaining how we were fucked and who was fucking us. It was empowering the way having a high-school teacher take your opinions seriously is empowering. Someone was explaining the news to you, and you got it for the first time; you got why it was so important.

He's angry the way usually only people in Aaron Sorkin scripts are angry—a smart, slightly self-mocking righteousness that is deadly serious about making jokes.

It's easy to dig into this outrage-based mockery if you're a certain kind of person—well-educated, a follower of the news, probably left-leaning, young, and convinced that things could be better. The kind of person who was on the cusp of adulthood when 9/11 hit and who remembers clearly the things that followed it, the sudden surge of security at airports and sports stadiums, the serious men in charge who said we were going to war, the crowds and crowds of protesters who didn't want the war—and we remember too that the crowds were right, that the war was a bad idea or at least poorly planned and in any case fucked, and the men in charge were at worst war criminals and at best just lousy at their jobs but either way still, somehow, in charge.

You had to laugh at all that, even if it was a kind of bitter laugh that you didn't know what to do with, and the Daily Show let you laugh that way. More than that, though, being a Daily Show fan meant affiliating yourself with a tribe of angry dreamers who would one day defeat the Fox News tribe and the cynical fucks of the Republican Party and create an America that you could be proud of. Facebooking a video of Stewart "taking down" or "destroying" Sarah Palin or Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck was a kind of shorthand that let everyone know:

I'd never vote Republican, but I don't like the Democrats much either. I care about equality; I care about the horrible things that the government and corporations are doing to the middle-class and poor people in this country. I'm pro-choice and anti-homophobia. I know that the media lies to us; I know 95 percent of what we're fed is bullshit. I voted for Obama, but I wish he had done a better job. I also probably own some funny T-shirts. Fuck Bush, fuck the war, fuck the Patriot Act, fuck the war on drugs—and I'll say as much on a funny T-shirt.

Watch: The Man Who Can Control His Nervous System Through Meditation

For a lot of people, Stewart said what they thought, only he made it sound funnier and smarter and easier to agree with than they ever could. He was a voice of a generation who told them what they already knew. (Never mind that he's a Gen X-er largely speaking to millennials, a dude so 90s he wore jeans and a leather jacket on his short-lived MTV talk show.)

He was so universally beloved that the New York Times ran a 2008 profile asking if he were the most trusted man in America; the paper later compared him to legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow after The Daily Show helped convince Congress to fund the health care of 9/11 first responders. He was seen as such a good guy that he went on Crossfire in 2004 just to shit all over the show and was praised by his fans for sparking a conversation that turned everyone involved into a defensive dick.

In 2010, at what was probably the height of his popularity, he held something called the Rally to Restore Sanity, which was supposed to be a parody of that year's Glenn Beck–hosted rally—but by then, his claims of being "just a comedian" were wearing thin. You don't bring tens of thousands of people to the middle of Washington, DC, as a goof. At that point you have a movement on your hands, a bunch of people waiting for you to tell them what to do to make it better.

I was one of those people, it's almost embarrassing to admit. I was down there in DC with the rest of them—it was about a year after I graduated college and my job sucked and my apartment sucked and the economy sucked and the debate about health care was just a howling dogpile of bad information, so why not just throw myself into a crowd? All I remember was being too far away from the stage to make out what was going on, and that I got separated from my friends and there were so many people around that my cell network crapped out from overuse. So I rode back to New York on those buses provided by Arianna Huffington—for whatever reason—and that was it. But what did I expect?

It wasn't his fault that his blend of outrage and hope found such an audience, or that cable news was so bad and dishonest that he never ran out of material.

Jon Stewart could explain to you what you should be angry at and why, and he was so good at this, the blending of outrage and hope and charm, that you could almost fool yourself into thinking righteousness was enough, that your personal cocktail of outrage and hope would blossom, magically, into a new world order. Your feeling that way was not his fault, just as it wasn't his fault that his blend of outrage and hope found such an audience, or that cable news was so bad and dishonest that he never ran out of material.

If he didn't tell his audience who to trust and how to get them elected, if he didn't personally create a viable political movement—well, he was just a comedian, as he kept telling anyone who would listen. And if, in the process of being a comedian, he really did turn into the most trusted man in news, the person we turned to for sanity in moments of national madness like the Charleston church shooting, that might say more about our lack of heroes than the legacy of a single cable TV host.

Follow Harry on Twitter

1995 publicity photo for Babe via Universal

James Cromwell doesn't care if you call him "the guy from Babe." Sure, he's been killing it lately in American Horror Story, and his performances in The Green Mile and LA Confidential are pretty legendary too. But the 75-year-old actor's life was completely changed by Babe, the story of a talking pig who escapes slaughter when a kindhearted farmer discovers he can herd sheep—a movie released 20 years ago this week.

Not only did Babe become a blockbuster that scored Cromwell an Oscar nomination, and move his headshot to the top of central casting's "Tall, British-Seeming Americans" pile, it was also the movie that made him a vegan.

The factoid is common knowledge: He'd been a somewhat casual vegetarian for years, but on the set of Babe, he had a change of heart.

Somewhat less well known is the fact that he's a really hardcore vegan. He narrated Farm to Fridge, one of those vivid animal rights documentaries that plunge you into the nightmarish, blood-geysering hellscapes of the slaughterhouse floors where America's meat gets created. He was also arrested during a protest against experiments on cats.

We got in touch with the very serious James Cromwell to find out how it feels to have your life completely changed by a movie about a talking pig. He was pretty adamant that Babe is not a kids' movie, and also that animals have unalienable rights that humans need to recognize.

Check out one of our documentaries on animal rights:

And it you liked that one, try this one.

VICE: It's been 20 years since Babe. How does that feel?
James Cromwell: Well, I'm not very good with time, but I suppose I feel it when I try to do some of the things I used to be able to do 20 years ago, and now can't.

Like that dancing scene in Babe?
Yeah, dancing is one of them. You know, it's a truism but it goes a lot faster the further on you get.

Does it bother you that Babe sorta defines your life in a way?
Listen: That film was a turning point in my life and in my career, and in fact, it gave me a career—up until that, I had a careen. So if I can trace back all the many blessings that exist in my life, it all began with that one film. It's been 20 glorious years.

Is it true that you didn't want to play Farmer Hoggett because he didn't talk much and you wanted more lines?
Well, yes, in the sense that when I told my dear friend Charles Keating that I was considering this, he said, "Hey, listen man. It's a free trip to Australia! If the movie stinks, it's the pig's fault. You don't carry the picture. The pig carries the picture!"

So was the shoot as easy as it sounded?
I felt I could just show up. But when I got to Australia, showing up involved, probably up until that point, the most generous and open and communal expression of my work in the industry. I mean, I loved Australia. I loved the director. Magda [Szubanski, who played Farmer Hoggett's wife] was adorable. The crew was great. I felt like, wow, I can just show up every day and enjoy every moment of this, shooting in this beautiful place, and I'm staying in this really nice place, I really like this country.

Tell me a little about the transition from vegetarian to vegan.
I had made the choice to become a vegetarian because I came across the country on my motorcycle and went through the feedlots in Texas for like a whole day, and just said, This really sucks. I can't do it.

Then, was there a particular moment with an animal on the set of Babe that really stands out?
We had a little pig that was brought out for the last scene, during the pig contest. It had gone through the training that all the other little pigs had along the line. When that little pig was put down on that big pitch and saw the blue sky and the green grass and the sea, that pig just took off, and said, I don't want any part of this. I am out. I support that! And it was funny to see all the men in Wellingtons running after a pig.

Wouldn't you say that little moment was the movie in a nutshell?
The film is about what we do to each other by pigeonholing us and other people into certain categories that protect our own sense of entitlement and position and power. The little pig questions that and finds a receptive consciousness in Farmer Hoggett.

Does Farmer Hoggett, in your opinion, eventually come to vegetarianism or veganism?
Well, in real life, Farmer Hoggett did!

What's the moment when Farmer Hoggett makes the switch?
The moment when he feels he has made a snap judgment—that the pig is somehow responsible for the dogs getting in and killing his sheep. He doesn't even know about the dogs. He thinks that Babe has done this. So he gets his shotgun out and he is going to shoot the pig. At that moment, something intervenes and he withholds it. He has the opportunity to readjust his point of view and learn something. Farmer Hoggett's consciousness and our consciousness—if you'll allow yourself to take the time—will arrive at the same conclusion: that we have no right to usurpation of another sentient being's destiny for our own needs and self-interests.

So he's a vegetarian when we see him in Babe: Pig in the City! Why'd that movie vanish? I think it's great.
[Babe Director] Chris Noonan's gentleness, evenness, and that love informs Babe. That's why those two films are so different. And that's why the second one—although it's a wonderful film—[Babe: Pig in the City Director George Miller]'s personality, and the antipathy that he created in the higher echelons of the industry, led to that film being obliterated, just obliterated.

I've known plenty of people who went vegetarians after they watched Babe, and people make fun of them because it's a kids' movie—
No, I disagree with you there. It is a movie shot in such a way that kids can relate to those characters, and do what adults do: project their imaginations onto the characters that they see, and to imbue those characters with the aspirations that they themselves feel. Kids can do that at four, but the sophistication of Babe is that it analyzes, in parable form, the circumstances that people find themselves in when people are prejudiced against them.

In terms of persuading people, what would you say is the difference between your slaughterhouse documentary Farm to Fridge and Babe?
If you feel that there is a pressing need for people to understand the culture that they live in, and its cost to other beings, then you have to sort of whack them over the head. You have to show things that they really don't want to see because people don't feel that a subtler approach is efficacious. Babe is understood by children and dismissed. It was trivialized as a pig movie for children. How dare they put this film up for Best Film, and this actor up for Best Supporting? This is a children's film! Well, they miss the entire point because they're so jaded. Those people, you have to rub their noses in it and then you can say, OK, now let's forgive each other and now let's talk about it.

Do you have 20 years worth of pessimism about this stuff?
What makes me doubtful is the corporate mentality bred by a financial and economic system that puts profits before people, and creates—in the people that work for them—the very narrow, limited, inhumane routine. And that they are stuck in it.

Has anything made you optimistic?
There's so much evidence of the rise of consciousness! Just the fact that I can go to restaurants now and say "I'm a vegan," and have the chef say at one of the best restaurants in New York "Great!" and fix me this extraordinary meal.

Could there be more Babe movies?
[Original author] Dick King-Smith wrote 75 other stories about pigs. I had one that Chris told me about where a future relative of Farmer Hoggett has this pig and he takes it to a bar and they drink beer together. He gets in the newspaper and somebody calls him and says, "Oh, you should come to Sydney and get on television." And while the pig is on television drinking beer and everybody is laughing and having fun, the pig opens his mouth and talks to human beings and, of course, they're poleaxed. But the fact that none of these get made, that there isn't a Babe 3 and 4 and 5, and yet you have Halloween 15...?

I'd love to see a Babe 3.
Oh! It would be great. If you get George Miller to produce it and write it, and Chris Noonan to direct, it would be something.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The Wayne Knight Rises. Image by the author

Hey whats up! This is @seinfeld2000 and honestly, my whole thing is that on social media i just focus on what seinfeld would be like if it still was today. im trying to get to the bottom of it. does that make sense?

so it was simply an honor for me to interview Wayne Knight. Not only becase he played Newman on seinfeld, like umm are you kidding me, but also cause his acting career game strong af. ill wait while u click on this link to his IMDB. u back? ya. Basic Instinct. Jurasic Park. JFK. Space Jam. Who ran the 90s? Wayne

If youre wondering what hes up to now, relax because i am literaly about to tell you: he is currently in the show The Exes on TV Land. The series started on Wednesday November 30 2011 and now in its fourth season. epsodes air Wednesdays at 11 PM ET/PT, why not check it out? Knight stars along side Kristen Johnston with whom he was in 3rd Rock From the Sun (u forgot about that rite) and then when they were casting for the show, the producers must have went "unlike TLC we do want Scrubs" and threw the gawd donald faison in to the mix. it is a breezy traditional multi cam sitcom that harken back to the time when seinfeld still on TV

Next up, Wayne is heading back to film with a role in the new Coen Brothers movie Hail Ceasar! Im not seeing that on IMDB so i think thats breaking news and the mods and/or admin there might want to update his page after they read this. also he talked excluisve to me about what he thinks of the potential Space Jam sequal with Lebron james everybody was buzzing about on facebook and the latest streaming apps like periscope and TIDAL

relataed: @Seinfeld2000 Interviewed the Porn Star Bree Olson About 'Seinfeld'

we talked about so much stuff, like i really went full Barbra Walters on (Lil) Wayne Knight. At one point he said he was a private eye back in the day. Now look i have to take that with a sprinkle of salt bc he said it DIRECTLY after saying he has fabricated stories in the past (not to mention he might have been fucking w me bc my life is devoted to imagening scenarios just like Newman playing a private investigator) but then again he sounded sincere on the phone & his story was fairly detailed and i also looked it up and the LA times reported this as well in 1993 so i guess it checks out??

Look. i like to "goof around " a lot on social media. But when youre talking to a screen & stage legend like Wayne Knight who is ENSCONSED in the seinfeld universe and emblazoned in popular cutlure, its time to get serious. im glad i did bc the result is honestly one of the best interviews in journalism history. Lets go

VICE: Hey wayne!! I was really relieved when you didnt die last year
Wayne Knight: You know, I was rather relieved myself. It's an odd one. But the only thing it did to me was increase my Twitter following. Apart from that, I think I'm much the same.

how did you first find out you passed away?
I saw it online. Luckily I was able to go on to Twitter and disappoint everyone and announce that I had not passed away. I just noticed all these like RIPs, and "We'll miss you," and all this kind of stuff. It was a little premature, but nice. And then I realized that I had died. And I know that some people many times have thought my career was dead, but I've never had anyone think that I personally was dead before. So it was kind of a shock.

Frankly, I was underwhelmed. I expected more. And now of course now when I do kick, no one's going to believe it.

"There was a part in the play of a socially retarded, very corpulent 16-year-old with pimples all over his face and thick glasses who was riding a tricycle. And I said, 'Oh shit, I can do that.'"

Having worked with Larry David, were you surprised he was going to do eight shows a week on broadway in Fish in the dark?
Yes! I had no idea—but then again, writing is work. So I guess he does like work. Most actors don't like unemployment, but they don't like work. The reason why you become an actor is to avoid work, and then you realize that you're not going to be working very much, and then you get really upset. It's an odd conundrum. I go back and do Broadway and stage on a regular basis when I can. And although it is the most taxing in some ways, it's also the most rewarding. There's something magical about sharing your breath with people watching you do a show and getting prepared for it and walking in to the theater each night and hearing the clamor of the audience walking in, the curtain going up. It is a different kettle of fish than television or film.

What was your first role on broadway?
I was 23, I had seen a gone to see a play, Gemini, on Broadway at what was then the Little Theatre, it's now the Helen Hayes. And there was a part in the play of a socially retarded, very corpulent 16-year-old with pimples all over his face and thick glasses who was riding a tricycle. And I said, "Oh shit, I can do that." There was something about him because he was so totally outside of the world of everybody else that there was something bizarrely endearing about him at the same time. And he was fascinated with subway trains. I had no agent. I had just kind of come in town, and I assembled my resume and picture and walked down the alleyway to the stage door, knocked on the door, asked the doorman for the stage manager, handed him my picture and resume and said, "If you're ever replacing for the role of Herschel, I'd like to be seen." And, you know, what a joke. But some six months later, they called me in and I got it. Cold. Without any representation. It was just unreasonable hopefulness that I could do that. And I did. I was in that play for three years.

Gemini's playbill, courtesy of Wayne Knight

That's basically where I learned how to act. You learn so much from classes and your preconceived notions, but getting on the stage, especially in this comedy, which was operatic in its scope and also very very meticulous in terms of its timing. You had to have really good comic timing to get the laughs. There were certain runs in it that required you to be spot-on, farce-like, in terms of when the door opens and when you speak and stuff like that. It was quite a master class in acting. I thought that I was going to just—once I got on Broadway, I thought, Well, that's that. I'm just gonna ascend into the heavens. It'll be one job after another. And the show came to an end and I didn't work again for like two, three years! 'Cause I was a young character actor and I was in this odd makeup. So it was the beginning of a process. But everybody, all my actor friends, we'd all come to New York. I went to the University of Georgia and a bunch of friends came with me, and we all had an apartment on the West Side that we called New Georgia and I was the first one to break out. And so everybody celebrated that, and I got my first credit card and I wrote down that I had worked 50 weeks that previous year as an actor, and that [was] an amazing thing.

Wikipedia says you "performed street magic for a period of time" during those days. ok is that like–
No! I don't know who put that in Wikipedia, but it's totally not true.

"He says, 'They like hiring actors. Because they're usually intelligent, conversant, they can play different parts, and they have no scruples.'"

Its weirdly specific for a made up fact
For the longest time, I would plant odd things and see where they would wind up. Like, I had an interview for NBC once where I said that I was learning how to fly fixed-wing aircraft. And I wasn't. But I loved to see how it turns up, for years and years and years it turns up in different places, where people just kind of boilerplate their shit; they don't even check. I didn't perform street magic. Let me see if there's anything similar. No. But I did work for five years as a private investigator.

for real?
Yeah. While in New York, I worked as a private eye, and while working in that capacity, I got a series in London, which was three Americans and three Brits doing a sketch-comedy show. I did two seasons of that and after each season of it, I would come back, and go back to work as a private eye. My dad had a big work ethic, and I didn't feel good about being on unemployment. So I was waiting tables like everybody else when I first started. And I had a friend who said, "Well, I've got a job that you might be interested in." I go, "Yeah? What's that?" And he goes, "I'm a private investigator." I go, "What? You don't have any police background. Were you trained for this?" "No." How did you get hired? He says, "Well, they like hiring actors. Because they're usually intelligent, conversant, they can play different parts, and they have no scruples."

Knight in '3rd Rock from the Sun.' Photo courtesy of Wayne Knight

What stuff were you investigating?
I did all kinds of things, from background investigations on people trying to get employed, to following people who were infidelitous. I [did] some stuff in venture capital. The most interesting stuff was where I was talking to admirals and heads of industry about people doing recombinant DNA work. And so I would just add a couple of phrases like, "As you know, this was tried before at AMGen and really it didn't work very well," and [they'd say] "Well, that's true but..." and they would go on and I'd write down what they were saying as if I knew what they were talking about.

Right now myself and a writing partner are working on doing a treatment of this period in my life. But now I've aged enough that I can play the guy who trained me, as opposed to myself. The idea of young actors being hired by a private investigator. We had a whole bunch of people who were young actors with fake names. My nom de guerre was Bill Monty. Which was my father's first name and my mother's maiden name. So if anytime anyone said, "Who are you?" you wouldn't forget. And a call would come into the place, you know, "Is anybody here Bill Monty today?" Yes, I am. I am." And you would write up cases like, "Under a suitable pretext, we learned..." Which means, "While lying my ass off and misrepresenting myself, I discovered..."

I mean it really does sound like a show.
I've been working on it for a long time. In terms of the people who were there, we had an amazing assemblage of people. My first trip to Los Angeles was [this work]. We had two people staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel and I was training somebody in Brentwood. It wasn't as an actor—it was as a private eye.

On Noisey: How Seinfeld's Theme Song Was Created

So you went from being a private eye to going on to all these iconic films from the 80s and 90s, im talking about Dirty Dancing, JFK, Basic Instinct, Jurasic park
Ironically, Seinfeld ended all that. It practically obliterated my film career in some ways, because by being on something that iconic and being that known for that character, it made it much more difficult as a character actor to disappear into film. It's the kind of Superman conundrum where George Reeves after doing Superman is in From Here to Eternity and when he comes on screen, everybody goes "Hey, that's Superman." So that's kind of true with Newman. I'm in the next Coen brothers film, Hail Ceasar!, and I'm very happy that I'm back to disappearing into film, which is hard because Seinfeld kind of refuses to die. It just goes on and on and on. And it's a very rare thing when you have a job that you're known for among one generation after another after another. I mean, people are not allowed to forget.

"I know that some people many times have thought my career was dead, but I've never had anyone think that I personally was dead before."

Yeah there isnt really a sitcom that has sustained for so long. why is that
First of all, it was a damned good show. And it was also very iconoclastic and bizarre in the sense that it was depicting people, New Yorkers especially, more as they are than as they wish they were. A lot of comedy and a lot of TV is wish fulfillment where you'll see families and hugs and lessons and idealized people. And there was nobody idealized on Seinfeld. They were all venal, selfish, self-absorbed, and crazy. And they were wonderfully recognizable because of that. They were like real people. In some ways, it's like why is Donald Trump doing well as a candidate. You just don't see that kind of shit! They usually clean those people up. There's something to be said for... like the term "sponge-worthy." When are you going to hear that?

Newman's greatest hits. Composite by the author

what can you say about this Coan brothers movie?
I can't tell you very much because we basically sign nondisclosure agreements on Coen brothers's stuff until they're released. They're very close-to-the-vest about that. But it's similar in some ways to what I did in Jurassic in the sense that I kick off a sequence of events that carries on throughout the film. I can't really say what I'm doing, but I'm walking around in a toga.

What are your memories of when u get directed by Oliver stone on JFK
Well, I'd done a very small thing in Born on the Fourth of July as well prior to JFK. I remember I was doing a play at Lincoln Center: Measure for Measure. And the casting directors at Lincoln Center were also casting this piece for Oliver. They needed this character, and I was auditioning for the part. They said to me, "Whatever you do, don't do anything 'actory.' He hates 'actory.'" And I'm like... "The fuck? What does that mean? Does he expect me to walk in and go, 'Howwwwww do you do?'" But, I went in and he was kind of like, not looking at me, and, you know. I don't know what Oliver is like now, but when I worked with him, he was in his surly, frighten-you-to-death period. I was just generally frightened of him. So the experience was a combination of elements. I was down in New Orleans, it was incredibly hot, it was like July. He had all these people who were the real people from the JFK assassination. We're doing stuff about Clay Shaw and Jim Garrison. I met Jim Garrison, and Jim Garrison's very old at the time and not well. And there was a bible of source material, so that you were inundated with it.

"I think Spielberg had seen me staring, salivating, and sweating while looking up someone's dress and thought, 'What if that were a dinosaur? Yes.'"

What was fascinating to me was that I've always been a JFK-conspiracy enthusiast because I was confirmed in the Catholic church on November 22, 1963, and the day that he was shot, and I was living in a small town in Georgia and the Monseigneur came to the town and said, "I'm not coming back to this town. Let's do this." We were like, "The President's been shot!" He was like, "So what? Let's go." We did the confirmation and we had a little party afterwards and we're all sitting there with the television on looking at Walter Cronkite, tearing and somber. It had a big effect on my life because I grew up Catholic and he was the first Catholic president. And after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I'd written him a letter saying "Thank you for saving my life" or something like that. And I'd gotten the letter back from Ted Sorensen saying, "The President has read your letter and hopes you have a continuing interest in public service." So I was really very attached to the Kennedys.

Composite by the author

lol and then like a year later youre shooting "magic loogie" on seinfeld
Yes, which is because one of the writers on the show was also a Kennedy-conspiracy enthusiast and had seen me in the movie and was like, "That's you! That's you!" And I went, "Yeah." And I played a character named Numa in the movie. So I did the re-enactment of that scene, "back and to the left" with Gary Grubbs in the movie, and Gary Grubbs had the same height relationship to me that Michael Richards had to me. And we reenacted that scene with the second spitter, and it's just like some kind of bizarre turn of events.

thats so meta
Before the word meta was even coined!

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Didnt this happen to you again with Basic Instict and seinfeld
Yes. We're the doing the investigation of the mail fraud, and [Jerry's] got a cold coke that he's holding and I'm lusting for it and licking my lips.

Who knew that this relatively small part in Basic Instinct, because it was in the trailer, because I was in that magical scene, would be more pivotal than almost anything I'd done? It's like, there wasn't much there, but I was the guy who was there at the moment. But I went in to audition for Paul Verhoeven, and he's a strange man who had a video camera up to his eye when you walked in the door. And he's like, [speaking in a Dutch accent] "Sit over here, over here, over here." OK... "All right now you're looking, you're looking, you're looking... All right now maybe you do like a lick. Do a little lick of the lips." And I go, OK. I do the lick. And he goes, "Maybe you do another lick. Maybe go lick, lick..." I do two. "Maybe you do a third lick, maybe you go lick, lick, lick." And I do lick, lick, lick, and he goes, "No, that's too many licks." It got cut down to two licks... That wasn't even acting. I was projectile sweating on my own.

"People ask me, 'Did you play any basketball with [Michael Jordan]?' I wouldn't even touch a basketball next to those guys. Are you kidding me? If they passed it to me, I would walk away. I didn't want to be seen touching it."

Jurasic Park is back with Jurasic world and its a box-office smash again. When you were working on the movie did you expect that it was going to be just such an internationel block buster?
I think that that's really the reason why people know me, because the things I've been involved in have been so successful. I mean, Seinfeld the number-one television show and Jurassic the number-one film, and then I'm hanging out with Michael Jordan. It's just a weird... I just travel in good circles, I suppose. But when I got that picture, it was bizarre. I didn't audition for it. It was just offered to me. I think Spielberg had seen me staring, salivating, and sweating while looking up someone's dress and thought, "What if that were a dinosaur? Yes."

I flew to Hawaii to start the filming on that, and I never met Spielberg until my first day of shooting. So we're in Kawaii, and they take me by truck up this road, which was muddy, and it's been raining because it's the rainiest place in all of the world, and we were pulling down this road and there were big trucks, rainmaking trucks and tanker-trucks and four-bangers and five-bangers and six-bangers and trailers, and we pull up at the base of the gate of Jurassic Park, this giant gate. And at the base of the gate is Spielberg. And I got out and walked to him and said, "I hope I'm the guy you wanted." And he says, "You're the guy."

Image by the author

What do you think of these rumors that are swirling every which way of maybe a possible new Space Jam except with Lebron James now
Yeah, but I mean, look. Lebron did so well in Trainwreck, one would think that he would do something other than Space Jam. Who knows. But I'm sure Warner Brothers would love for him to do it. Somebody put on Twitter, "You can't have another Space Jam without Wayne Knight." And I was like, "I'll bet you can!"

LMAO I think that was me
Doing that film was such a bizarre experience. Because it was green screen—the entire film was green screen with very few locations. And you've got people in green ninja suits who are crawling around on their knees replicating cartoon characters, and there's not an actor for miles around. There's not a set. There's not a prop. You're just acting against a vacuum. And then the only actors you get to talk to are basketball players. It's the strangest fricking gig ever.

What did you think of MJ as an actor?
I have no idea! I knew that as a physical specimen, I thought that he was the most incredible human being I'd ever seen. He had, like, muscles inside of muscles. In his calf, he had kind of like a "sproing" muscle. Where he would leap and then—sproing!—and he could go flying. And he was working out at the same time, 'cause they built him a gym, and he had all these guys coming in and going one-on-one with him and playing full-court basketball with him. And then you've got him and Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing and Muggsy Bogues and all these people hanging out, and it's just the weirdest... Here I am, this short, fat character actor who's not really the most athletically inclined person that you would imagine.

People ask me, "Did you play any basketball with him?" I wouldn't even touch a basketball next to those guys. Are you kidding me? If they passed it to me, I would walk away. I didn't want to be seen touching it.

Composite via the author

What was your life like at the height of seinfeld's popularity? Was it just an onslaught of people yelling "HELLO NEWMAN" the moment you stepped out of the door?
I honestly think that it's more prevalent now than it was when the show was on the air originally.

its acumulated or whatever
Yeah. Because now you've got grandparents, parents, and kids, all of whom have discovered the show on their own time. I got fan mail from Yemen. You know? Like... Yemen. What the fuck are you doing watching the show in Yemen? And everybody who comes up to me with the "Hello Newman" or whatever, still believes that no one else has ever said it. Or they'll say, "You must hate this, but..."

"I think what I find is the most fun is, you take a trait of your own that you don't like and magnify it by ten."

What was your experience back then working with larry david, what sort of notes would he give you esp. when u were first starting
Larry would say things like [speaking in a perfect Larry voice]... "No." And you go, "Oh... OK." Larry is actually very friendly, but I didn't know it. Because he was so intimidating to me. And everyone says, "Why were you intimidated by Larry?" I don't know. He's laconic and easygoing, but doesn't suffer fools lightly and knows exactly what he wants. So my job was to just try not to screw up. Because we would come to the table and what you were reading was so funny, and you knew that what you were doing—it was very similar to doing a Broadway opening every time you were doing a show. The guest stars were top-notch, the writing was top-notch, everybody on the show was top-notch. So I think that at that stage in my life, I was just trying not to blow it. And also, I was second-tier. Everybody calls Murray the K the fifth Beatle because he was in a room with the other four. But he wasn't. And that's similar to me. There was proximity, but there wasn't equivalence. And I didn't really know when I was gonna be used, and I didn't really have... I mean, it was an interesting experience.

Image courtesy of the author

You had a smaller role than the main cast but did so much with it. How did you develop all the mannerisms and sounds and quirks that just made that character Newman
I think what I find is the most fun is, you take a trait of your own that you don't like and magnify it by ten. So if you have any pomposity, you magnify the pomposity by ten. Magnify the insecurity by ten. And if you're trying to be erudite because you're afraid that you're getting a word wrong, you magnify that by ten. And then gradually your character becomes a quilt of all these insecurities. And because he's so insecure, he's simultaneously off-putting and lovable. Because you know that it's not coming from a place of malice, it's coming from fear.

If Seinfeld was still on TV today what do you think it would be like
It is! What are you talking about! Have you not gone to Hulu! It's still on! That's the only problem!

k. thanks for doing this interview man
I hope people will give the Exes a chance to take a look at it. Because being on TV Land is an odd experience. People still don't know what it is.

They started making original programs a few years ago right?
It's been about five years. They started with Hot in Cleveland, and they were going to do multi-camera sitcoms and revive the multi-camera sitcom to fit in their reruns and sitcoms. Now they're into a sort of a single-camera thing. They've changed the management of the network, so I don't know what happens to us. I sometimes feel like we're the last rock 'n' roll song on the station that's going country. But it's a nice place to work in the sense that there is much less interference on the network level than there would be at one of the big networks, in terms of micromanaging, so that's cool. But I wish they did a little bit more promotion. Nonetheless, I enjoy doing it. And I'm leaving it up to you to make sure that I can continue to do it.

Oh no!
If something should happen to the show I will blame you personally.

thats a lot of pressure wayne
I just want you to know.

The Exes airs Wednesdays at 11 PM on TV Land.

Follow @Seinfeld2000 on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user uncle-leo

There's a growing consensus in America that too many people are ensnared in the sprawling prison-industrial complex. The powers that be in Washington, DC, are increasingly amenable to criminal justice reform, which could dramatically reduce additions to the US prison population in the years ahead. And President Barack Obama seems to be dedicating the remainder of his time in the Oval Office in large part to curbing the worst parts of mass incarceration. (Obama recently became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, a trip that was filmed by VICE for an upcoming special, and followed that by announcing clemency for 46 nonviolent drug offenders.)

In New York City, home to a massive and notoriously dysfunctional jail system, reformers have focused in large part on getting people out before they go in. Earlier this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio—who ran on a progressive criminal justice platform—announced Justice Reboot, a program aimed at reducing the population of the hellish Rikers Island jail complex by 25 percent over ten years. The plan is to clear court backlogs to prevent young and vulnerable people—like Kalief Browder, who languished on Rikers for three years without trial—from getting lost in the system. And in late June, New York City created a $1.4 million bail fund to help many of those facing bails under $2,000.

Related: Tales from the Tombs: The Legacy of Violence at the Manhattan Detention Complex

But now New York Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton is apparently worried that the city is in danger of going a little too far when it comes to keeping people out of jail.

"There are people in our society, I'm sorry, they're criminals," Bratton said in a radio interview Wednesday. "They're bad people. You don't want to put them in diversion programs; you don't want to keep them out of jail. We need to work very hard to put them in jail and keep them there for a long time, because they're a danger to the rest of us, and that's the reality."

On the John Gambling Show, Bratton came out against programs he argues are "well-intended" but, ultimately, put lots of very bad men back onto the streets of New York. (It's unclear exactly which programs he was criticizing, but Bratton took pains to decry people who are "tipping too much on the side of letting them out.")

Reached for comment, a mayoral spokesperson told VICE, "Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bratton agree: If people break the law, there should be serious consequences and they should receive the appropriate penalties."

But pretty much everyone agrees that killers, murderers, and rapists should be locked up. The problem is that Bratton isn't really talking about them, so much as he's touching a nerve in the law and order community—not only in the Big Apple, but nationwide. Criminal justice reform that reduces the incarcerated population—even if it sounds awfully nice—could senselessly put communities at harm, according to some old-school cops and prosecutors.

"We can't lose sight of the fact that we have a hardcore criminal population in this city of several thousand people who have no values, no respect for human life," Bratton said in the radio interview.

The commissioner's dire warning came during what's been a bloody week for New York City. Early Sunday morning, at a party in East New York, Brooklyn, a group of men opened fire and injured nine people. The next day, in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood, two men shot five people in a drive-by, critically injuring a pregnant woman and taking the life of her unborn child.

Yet as grizzly as that sounds, gun violence is par for the course in New York City. When it comes to the statistics, this year hasn't been much different from 2014, which was generally on par with the years before that. All of which is to say: NYC is still the safest large city in America, and there's no indication that has changed.

"This idea that somehow too many people are getting out of jail makes zero sense considering violent crime has been on the decline here for years," Brian Sonenstein, a prison reform advocate and columnist for Shadowproof.com, a new progressive website, told VICE.

Watch: Inside Norway's Prisons

A sudden spree of shootings in June led to an early launch this year of "Operation All Out," a summer program that began in 2014 where NYPD officers usually on desk duty are assigned to crime-ridden areas. Shootings promptly dropped, and as the New York Times reported, word came from on high that only a small network of criminals—most of them gang-affiliated—are behind the city's lingering violent crime problem.

All of which begs the question: Why is Bratton talking about jail rather than street gangs?

"The insinuation that our modest reduction in incarceration levels has made us less safe is plainly untrue," Glenn Martin, the founder of JustLeadershipUSA, a criminal justice reform organization that seeks to cut the prison population in half by 2030, told VICE via email. "In point of fact, the data reveals that the trend is actually in the opposite direction. Are there people out there capable of committing acts of unimaginable cruelty? Of course, but that's a small fraction of the percentage of people we lock up."

In the Red Hook shooting, a 19-year-old suspect, Marquise Frederick, had three prior arrests—two of them for violent crimes—before he gave himself up to cops on Wednesday. Bratton cited this shooting in his diatribe against the prospect of unleashing hordes of psychos into the street, but cops told the Daily News that he was a member of a gang called the Oww Oww Crew based in Brooklyn's Gowanus houses, and that the shooting was in retaliation for another one nearby.

It's important to remember that the programs Bratton seems to be pissed about are aimed at nonviolent offenders—not people like Frederick.

"Didn't Bratton say last week that we weren't going back to the bad old days?" Joseph Giacalone, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired NYPD Detective Sergeant, asked me. "Didn't he also say on Tuesday that murder was up all across the country? I think he feels that his legacy is in jeopardy, if not tarnished already."

Giacalone argues that Bratton has been "looking for excuses" to help explain away the recent spate of shootings that has provided a steady stream of front-page fodder for the New York Post and other city tabloids. The idea that sentencing guidelines could be behind the spike is another one to add to the list, Giacalone said, when the real problem is the lack of proactive policing practices like stop-and-frisk—a procedure that came under intense scrutiny after a federal judge found its use to be unconstitutional in 2013. This more aggressive approach preferred by Giacalone would also include targeting gang violence and making more gun arrests.

"Proactive policing works, but it also creates police problems," he said. "Think Eric Garner. No cop wants to be the next test or court case or YouTube video of the week. Abandoning stop, question, and frisk is playing a role in the violence also. Many people, including Bratton, said it had no effect; the data doesn't show it. So then what does the data show is the cause?"

New York's jail practices are artifacts of an age when sentences were harsh because life in New York City was harsh. Eugene O'Donnell, another law enforcement expert at John Jay and a former Brooklyn cop and prosecutor himself, pointed to what he called "iconic crime events" in a time when tabloids like the Post ruled the news.

Now, O'Donnell explained, we're deconstructing this ingrained monster of a system run by quality-of-life crimes and massive sentences for drugs. So it's not surprising that Bratton would argue we're putting criminals back on the street—it's the same message that created those programs in the first place. What we're seeing these days, O'Donnell said, is the "pendulum swing back."

"If you release 500 people from jail at once, that's bad public policy. It's not risk-free to let people out of jail," O'Donnell told VICE. "But not even the most left-wing prosecutor would argue that the goal is to not protect against the hardcore criminals. The challenge has always been particularizing that justice—finding that balance between doing too much, or arresting an entire village to find one person, and too little."

Of course, many police reform advocates argue that cops in the city are doing too much, just not on the right front. A recent report released by the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP) examined the number of punitive interactions between police officers and New Yorkers, which totaled nearly two million last year. And most of these interactions, PROP director Bob Gangi said, resulted in hundreds of thousands of "frivolous infractions"—the cornerstone of Bratton's "broken windows" policing theory.

"The people behind the shootings Bratton cited are dangerous and predatory, in all likelihood," Gangi told VICE. "But most of the people his police are arresting aren't dangerous. So, if he is serious about crime problems, Bratton should instead be focused on better and more focused policing. A solid number of the officers in his force are not fighting crime, and his policies are not only racist, but counter-productive."

Given what's happening on the national stage, you can add "outdated" to that list.

"At a time when even conservative Republicans in Washington agree that over-incarceration is‎ a serious problem throughout our country, Commissioner Bratton, of course, argues that we under-incarcerate," Priscilla Gonzalez, a spokesperson for Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), said in a statement. "It's yet another example of him utilizing an incident that unites New Yorkers—in this case, one we all recognize as both senseless and tragic—to advocate for broad regressive criminal justice policy that divides and harms our communities while failing to make us safer."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Shawn Rossi

Related: Classical music relaxes cats during surgery.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong during surgery: You could wake up in the middle of it, your surgeon could accidentally operate on the wrong body part, your anesthesiologist could spend the entire surgery shit-talking you. One thing that rarely makes the list of worries, though, is the type of music your surgeon listens to. Over two-thirds of surgeons play music in the operating room, but according to a new study, published by the Journal of Advanced Nursing, listening to bass-heavy music prevents surgeons from communicating adequately during surgery, which can lead to worse operating outcomes.

The study was based on 35 hours and 20 surgeries worth of video footage in operating rooms. Of those surgeries, doctors listened to music in 16 of them—often electronic, drum and bass music. Researchers who reviewed the video footage found that surgeons weren't able to communicate as well with their nurses when there was thumping music in the room, and medics were five times as likely to repeat requests than in surgeries without music.

I can think of few things more genuinely frightening than being anesthetized cut open only to have a nurse misunderstand something and fuck up the surgery because there was some drum and bass pounding in the background.In an article from The Guardian about what surgeons listen to during operations, one man recalls how "surreal" it was to hear surgeons blasting during his pregnant wife's C-section. "Our eldest son was born to the sound of some hardcore Ibiza club hit," he said.

According to that same article, most surgeons use music to create a "harmonious and calm atmosphere" in the operating room. Others, somewhat worryingly, use it to stop from "getting bored."

Besides today's most recent study, there has been other research into the matter—with varying results. A study from last year, which measured surgeons' performance while stitching up a wound, found higher quality stitching and 8 to 10 percent more efficient when music was played. That corroborates a study from 1994, which found that when surgeons selected the music in the OR, they were less stressed, more accurate, and faster in their operations. But another study, from 2008, called music in the operating room "distracting;" a survey of 200 anesthesiologists found that just over half considered music a distraction.

The real problem might be the kind of music. Claudius Conrad, a surgeon who also casually holds a PhD in music philosophy, tested the performance of colleagues who worked in silence, listened to Mozart, or listened to an ear-bleeding combination of German folk and death metal. He found that, of the three scenarios, surgeons performed quickest and most accurately when they listened to Mozart. His research was small-scale, but if it's true, it might be worthwhile to give your surgeon a tape of A Little Night Music before going under the knife.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Clockwise from left: Kool FM family MC Co-Gee, Ruddy Ranks, Eastman, and MC Remadee, in the early 1990s

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If pirate radio has a home, it's in London's tower blocks and tinny car radios. Bar the capital, where else can you find one DJ playing Ghanaian gospel and another spinning some ancient dub track, followed by a crackly ad for "Reg's Records," in which a man named Reg nervously offers to buy up all your dusty reggae vinyl? Chances are: nowhere—mostly because no other city has nearly as many pirates simultaneously on air at any one time (around 70 at Ofcom's last count).

Many of these stations come and go within a matter of years—an inevitability, considering they're illegal to run; punishable with fines, the seizure of equipment and, for repeat offenders, a prison sentence. But some pirates stick around. Some have as firm a spot in London's cultural depot as Carnival, or the ICA, or G-A-Y, or that time David Blaine sat in a glass box above the Thames and a load of shirtless English men threw Stella cans at him.

Few pirates embody this perseverance better than Kool London, the city's longest-running jungle station. Founded as Kool FM in 1991 by DJs Eastman and Smurff, it's spent nearly a quarter of a century transmitting hardcore, jungle, and drum 'n' bass from antennas installed on the roofs of Hackney's council flats.

"The way it started," says Eastman, now Kool's remaining co-founder after Smurff's departure in 1998, "is that my little sister had a group of friends from Hackney Wick. I knew one of them—this Turkish guy, T—and he had a brother called Smurff, who approached me and said he wanted to start a new station. He'd done a couple of little ones before, but they kept getting hit by other pirates—smashed up and that. He said, 'I want a bit of muscle behind me to do something new.' I was running a reggae sound-system, and was also head of security at my father's club, Telepathy, in [Stratford]. The security side was what he needed, so that was that: we set up Kool."

DJ Chef. Photo by Carl Wilson

I'm sat opposite Eastman at an east London recording studio. Behind me, manning Kool's online forum and tinkering with sound levels on a monitor, is Chef, a warm, affable DJ who grew up listening to the station. In 2004, he was offered a regular Thursday night slot, taking over the show previously hosted by Marley Marl and DJ Remarc, and later became involved in the day-to-day management. Behind him, in the vocal booth, recording the radio advert for Kool's next club night, are the Ragga Twins, Flinty Badman, and Deman Rocker. The two MCs have been involved with Kool since pretty much day one, and played a fundamental role in the birth of jungle, lending their vocals to the producers who created the genre.

While Kool started broadcasting online in early 2000, rebranding itself from Kool FM to Kool London, it's also continued to transmit over its pirate frequency, 94.6 FM, the same way it has since Eastman and Smurff first took the station on air 24 years ago.

"The first show we did was from Banister House [housing estate] in Hackney. It was November the 28, 1991," says Eastman. "We commandeered Smurff's brother's bedroom, put our stuff in there, and went down to [another building on] Clapton Square to set up the transmitter on the roof. There was nothing better than getting up there, plugging everything in and hearing that 'sshhhh'—that white noise [meaning the equipment was working]. It's always an amazing feeling."

The first UK pirate station was Radio Caroline. Founded in 1964 to play the pop and rock that the BBC wouldn't, it was run from a ship off the coast of Essex. More stations based on boats and disused sea forts followed, hence the whole "pirate" thing, and, by 1965, roughly 10 to 15 million Brits were tuning into "offshores" on a daily basis. By 1967, the BBC were forced to react, launching Radio 1—its first pop station—in a bid to claw back listeners. Helpfully, the government then outlawed all offshore stations, but the legislation had little effect on what, by now, was far more than just a few amateur mariners playing Canned Heat EPs to an audience of bearded philosophy students.

Many of the originators moved their operations to towns and cities, where stations broadcasting without a license were harder for authorities to pinpoint. Offshore, your only real option was to set up on a highly visible hunk of floating metal. Onshore, the favored method was to pre-record your show, climb up to the roof of a tower block and play your tape through a homemade transmitter, which could be hidden when you were done. More and more of these stations began to spring up throughout the 1970s and 80s, to the point where, at one time, there were more illegal stations on air than legal.

By 1989, around 600 pirates were operating in the UK, now transmitting live from clandestine studios rather than beaming out pre-taped shows. However, this number dipped soon after because of increased pressure from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the now-defunct body that was responsible for radio regulation at the time.

In a further effort to rid Britain of its illegal radio stations, the government offered amnesty to pirates that shut down voluntarily and applied for a license. Kiss FM—the then-leading dance pirate—jumped on this offer and became a legal station in 1990, gaining legitimacy but losing some of its appeal to the thousands of young Brits who'd taken to gathering in fields to wave their limbs around and grind their teeth down to nubs.

From left to right: MC Remadee, Smurff, DJ Trace, and DJ Ice at Kool FM in 1994

Cue a proliferation of the new breed of pirate: stations effectively broadcasting raves live on air, with MCs spitting over DJ sets and the audience phoning in requests, rather than shouting them up from in front of the decks.

"The audience for Kool was instant," says Eastman, recalling the early days, from late-1991 into early-1992. "We were mainly just doing the weekends back then; we wanted to keep out the way of the DTI while we were finding our way, and if you were on full time you'd get hit [by raids] a lot more. But it didn't take long for us to get on 24/7."

Jungle as we know it—the music that soundtracked your teenage hotboxes—didn't really exist when Kool was founded. "We were playing hardcore in them early days," says Chef. "[Rave] was moving from the kind of Balearic acid stuff into hardcore, then jungle techno, and the station supported that. We were playing stuff like Joey Beltram, Energy Flash, a lot from XL Recordings... this was 1991; jungle hadn't even been born yet. And then, slowly, this jungle sound started coming in. It wasn't even called jungle back then—it was a mix of all these producers getting into the sound, bringing these hip-hop, soul, and ragga elements in."

The Ragga Twins, Flinty and Deman. Photo by Carl Wilson

The Ragga Twins—as you've probably realized, given the name—were instrumental when it came to the ragga side of things, the Caribbean influence that spawned its own subgenre, ragga-jungle, before making itself known again in the formation and evolution of dubstep. Already friendly with Eastman after growing up in the same part of Hackney and MCing on his sound system, it didn't take long for the duo to get involved with Kool.

"You'd be listening from home and think, 'Rah, that DJ is going in—let me get up there before they stop playing those good tunes,'" says Flinty. "And so we'd just go up there and lounge in the studio."

"Kool was one big family," adds Deman. "It still is now, but back then—in those early, early days—it was mad, especially after the birthday parties. The Sunday after them would be a proper super Sunday, because man was still buzzing from the party before. We'd converge on the studio with six or seven MCs and three DJs, and we were jamming."

Blusey G, Skibadee, and Tekka at a Kool FM night in 1995

The first of these birthday parties, at the end of 1992, was one of the station's earliest triumphs. "We hadn't done any events, but we thought we'd put a little do on for our one-year anniversary," says Eastman. "We done a little rave at Arcola Street in Stoke Newington, and it was packed—the phone-line for it was non-stop."

A couple of years later, as the genre was beginning to properly take off, Kool threw a birthday party that cemented their status as London's prime jungle pirate. "We had our third birthday at the Astoria and we shut down the whole of Tottenham Court Road," laughs Eastman. "We had 3,000 inside, and there was something like 4,000 or 5,000 outside. They had to close the club next door for the night because nobody could get in or out."

Like dance music? Read Thump, our whole site dedicated to it.

The success of these Kool parties led to the setting up of Jungle Fever, a regular club night that's still going today. "The name Jungle Fever came from the Spike Lee film [of the same name]," says Eastman. "The film's about mixed relations, about black and white, which I thought was fitting, as rave culture was doing more for race relations in the UK at the time than anything else."

The nights were wildly popular, but didn't come without their own era-specific, firearm-y issues. "In 1994, we did a Jungle Fever in south London—there was some trouble there in them days," says Eastman. "Police had to stop that one because there were some guys outside the venue waving guns about, arguing with security."

It was because of this climate that Kool—along with a number of other pirates of the time—ended up unfairly accused of involvement in the UK drug trade. Memorably, The Evening Standard ran a front page splash making out that Rush FM, one of Kool's contemporaries, was part of one of London's biggest drug operations.

Jungle Fever, 2005

"It was bollocks," laughs Chef. "Obviously there was a massive drugs influence in all the parties at the time, but that was going on for decades before rave and Kool FM. The media loved to paint the picture that we were part of that influx, but we had nothing to do with it. We had no dealers on the firm; nothing. We were a gang, but we were a musical gang—nothing to do with causing trouble or selling drugs."

"Yeah, I remember my mum seeing that," sighs Eastman when I bring up the Standard story. "She got really upset; she was going mad. But I was like, 'Serious, mum, I don't even smoke weed!"

Besides the whole defamation thing, the mid-90s were a peak era for Kool. "That was the start of the golden age of jungle, from 1994 to 1996," says Chef. "M-Beat and General Levy with 'Incredible'; Shy FX and Gunsmoke with 'Gangsta'; UK Apache with 'Original Nuttah'; Demolition Man with 'Fire'– this was time the tunes that I'd call jungle classics all came out. It was also around that time that someone from the BBC came to speak to Eastman, and [the Radio 1 show] 'Radio 1 in the Jungle' was born—the first time mainstream radio touched our music. Some of our guys were on there, so it took us from being a London station to being known nationally."

DJ Crissy Criss, aged about 12 (he started DJing on Kool at age 11)

Thing is, while junglists UK-wide might have heard of Kool, the station was still only transmitting—at its absolute maximum, if they managed to get all their gear onto a particularly high roof—as far as the M25. So, pre-internet, fans had to find alternative ways to get their fill.

"There were people driving to London from as far away as Cornwall and Bristol, sitting in their cars, recording a few hours of Kool with a tape-recorder, then going back north or south and sharing the tapes around," recalls Eastman. "And then we started doing the tape-packs [of Kool FM shows]—we had distributors up in Birmingham, so we'd send them there and they'd distribute them."

By 1996, Kool had opened a Birmingham outpost. "That was our sister station, and we had a few big names come out of that—DJ Hazard, DJ Spice, DJ Devize," says Eastman. "That was on for four or five years, but what happened is that my mate who was running it went and got a record shop straight away and set up the studio in the back, so it got noticed [and shut down]."

DJ Footloose at Jungle Fever

As jungle gave way to drum 'n' bass, Kool kept pace—the music was similar enough to what they'd been playing for the past five or six years, if not a little tech-ier. But when garage came along, they refused to jump on the bandwagon. "Garage was really the downturn for the station—and, actually, the whole jungle scene—because the commercials were pumping money into it, and a lot of people around us—Pay as You Go, Nicky Slim Ting, Maxwell D, MC PSG, people like that—left Kool and jungle behind, and went to garage," says Eastman.

Garage as a scene was a relatively preoccupied, to its own detriment, with image and bravado, hence all the champagne and Moschino and pirate radio call-outs to "bring straps" to raves. It was that latter aspect that inspired all the subsequent panicked headlines about UKG club-nights being like some kind of central London Stalingrad.

"We wanted to be—and still want to be—as professional a station as we can be," says Chef, "so we were never gonna have MCs talking about how they're gonna 'shank man' or 'kill man.' If anything, we've been a community voice—there was a hit and run outside a rave once, for example, we did the public appeal for that to help gather information. And then [the London Met drug operation] Trident started trying to work with us, because they knew we were reaching an audience they couldn't."

Smurff, DJ Ash, and DJ Slippery in the Kool FM studio, 1994

As garage self-imploded among a weird mix of rave stabbings and UKG-lite topping the charts, a new sound began to erupt out of east London, rawer, shoutier, more visceral than its predecessor. "We never had grime on Kool, but I know that a load of grime's top guys—Flowdan, Dizzee, Wiley, Riko—would cite Kool FM as something that inspired them to start MCing," says Chef. "Thing is, all those grime pioneers couldn't become jungle MCs because the older guys had locked it down; it was at full capacity. And they didn't want to MC over this pretty boy music [garage], so they did their own thing."

With the arrival of grime, every boy from Bow to Brixton with an Avirex jacket and a pair of decks wanted to set up their own pirate. "It just exploded," says Chef. "Literally, there'd be a station on every frequency as you scrolled through the FM dial."

Though they weren't regularly hosting the Slimzees or Wileys making their names on all these new stations, Kool benefitted from the grime scene: jungle had a huge influence on the genre; more people were tuning into pirates again; and Kool was the natural place to go for tunes before and after the rave. "Around the start of garage, people had told us jungle was dead," recalls Eastman. "We decided to stick to our guns—stick to what we know—and it's paid off."

Dizzee Rascal, D Double E, Skibadee, Funsta, Harry Shotta, and Ruffstuff on Kool FM, 2007

In 2000, with the launch of the online station, Kool started reaching audiences it never could have imagined that first time Eastman and Smurff clambered up a Hackney tower block to set up their transmitter. "Because of the internet, we've now got guys doing regular sets from Toronto, New York, Australia," says Chef. "It's mad, when you think about it now—to have gone from a little Hackney thing to a worldwide thing."

As it stands, the internet looks to be the future of Kool. For years, various British governments have been floating the idea of killing the FM frequency altogether, with Culture Minister Ed Vaizey saying earlier this year that the UK is reaching a "tipping point" in the conversion to digital radio. And he's right: the vast majority of new cars and hi-fis only pick up the digital signal, "DAB."

As Chef points out: "In a couple of years, you're not going to find FM receivers anywhere. Maybe in pound shops, but new cars—and anything being made with a radio in it—will only do DAB. They're trying to get rid of anything analogue."

I wonder if this digitization will pinch some of the magic away from pirates. There are hundreds of thousands of online radio stations, and Soundcloud pages, and Spotify playlists, and curated YouTube channels—base yourself solely online and you're in danger of being lost in the throng.

"Any competition keeps us on our toes—it's not a bad thing," Eastman points out. "And we're branching out into other things, too: Redbull have asked us to do something for their Redbull Academy Radio; a couple of years ago we broadcast live for two weeks from the Royal Academy of Arts. These things are such an achievement for us, because it's an acknowledgement from society as a whole, not just ravers."

Funky Flirt at Jungle Fever, 2008

I ask if the idea of going digital has been floated, given that—without doing so—it won't be long before Kool will no longer be heard booming out of car stereos, the first place I personally discovered the station. "I looked into getting a digital license, but it's so expensive—three and a half grand a month," says Chef. Considering the station makes its money from advertisements and by charging DJs fees to play, it's unlikely they'd be able to generate anywhere near enough revenue to pay that bill month after month. "The only way of doing it would be if we got sponsorship from an ethical brand, but it would have to be one that we all believed in—we don't want some major sport brand that uses child labor paying our broadcasting fees," says Chef.

Eastman agrees: "Yeah, there are ways of going commercial where you don't have to sell your soul."

Of course, there's also every chance the station will continue to thrive online, because what all the 2.0 competition doesn't have is the heritage. "We've got so much history behind us," says Eastman. "Jungle, to me, is a family thing—it comes from where we come from, and we've come up with it." This history is a powerful weapon in Kool's arsenal; if you feel like tuning in for six solid hours of hardcore and jungle, who are you going to choose: the guys who've been doing it for 25 years—the guys who nurtured the sound and quite literally took it global—or some bedroom DJ in Watford live-streaming over Justin.tv?

"If they wanted to, the government could take us off air right now; they could kill the FM frequency, just like that," says Eastman. "So I think the future of Kool is us really pushing the .com. The good thing about it, as well as the fact anyone in the world can pick it up, is that we have our archive up there, too, so people can hear sets and tunes from years ago, which obviously you can't do on the FM."

Related: Watch our film, 'Pirate Radio'

I worried, heading to meet the Kool lot, that I might find a station in crisis. That the phasing out of the analogue FM signal—the one thing vital to a pirate radio station's existence—would kill pirate culture. Because what's the point of lugging equipment up stairs, busting open doors to roofs and flirting with the threat of punishment if nobody's there to hear the result of your efforts? And would it also not destroy the inherent thrill of the whole operation? As a kid, smoking at school stops being fun as soon as you finish your last exam, simply because you know there's no longer a danger of being caught and getting into trouble. If the pirates' cat and mouse game with the government is cut short, are they going to get as much joy out of opening a laptop and pressing play?

"You know what, in the early days, with the transmitters and that, it was about being a bit of a 'villain'—kids against the government," says Eastman. "But it was also about doing our own thing, playing our own music. It was all for the love of it. And what's important is that none of that has changed; we're older now and we've got to pay our bills, so the station has turned into more of a 'job.' But we still love what we do, and we'll keep on doing it for as long as we can."

Follow Jamie on Twitter.

All photos by Norman Behrendt

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic opened up a whole new landscape for West Berlin's graffiti artists to explore. While the Western side of the almost 12-foot-tall concrete wall had been a canvas for street art throughout the 1980s, its Eastern side had managed to remain almost completely unscathed thanks to all the watchtowers and guard dogs that the Socialist regime used to prevent its citizens from leaving. Once the wall was demolished in 1989, West Berlin's graffiti artists were granted newfound access to the former GDR and began to inspire a whole new generation of writers.

Photographer Norman Behrendt grew up around the newly unified Berlin graffiti scene. In 2007, he decided to start shooting portraits of some of the more prominent artists of his generation. The project grew until he had collected the 83 portraits and 76 interviews that now make up his book Burning Down the House (seltmann+söhne, 2015).

"I mostly focused on the guys living double lives," Norman told me. "Some are lawyers, others are students, and one even works for the police." In an attempt to avoid all of the usual stereotypes, Norman tried to capture the anonymous artists in some of Berlin's most public spaces. "The point I am trying to make is: You can't just judge people by the way they look," he said.

The portraits are a collaboration between the photographer and the subject, with each writer choosing how to represent themselves. All of the pictures play with themes relating to their individual work—from the clothes they wear to the locations they're shot in. One guy, for instance, decided to cover himself in four liters of pig's blood before being photographed.

Surprisingly, many of the subjects agreed to pose with their faces totally visible—a brave statement given that massive fines and potential prison sentences often await those caught by the police. In an ironic twist, the book itself is bound with the same material that's used to upholster Berlin's U-Bahn train seats because its iconic "puzzle print" is said to work like urban camouflage and deter tags. Its use in the book had to be approved by the BVG (Berlin Public Transport Company) who, every year, fork out millions of euros in an attempt to repel graffiti artists and clean up after them.

WATCH: 'London Bikelife'

The end of the book features additional polaroid portraits, which were shot separately to the original portraits and sent to the individual artists for approval. These polaroids were returned to Norman uniquely customized, in a final attempt for the artists to stamp their mark whilst remaining anonymous—which, in many ways, is the fundamental core of being a graffiti artist.

Burning Down the House (seltmann+söhne) was published in January 2015. Norman is currently selling a special edition of the book limited to 30 unique copies. Order it here.